Wednesday, November 30, 2016

By the time you read this post, many of you celebrated Thanksgiving with loved ones and friends.

And you memorialized the occasion by taking selfies and other pictures with your smartphones.

These 21st century digital images live in our smart phones or have been uploaded to the cloud.

But let's remember the iPhone didn't exist before 2007, so if you're like me, you have crates of photos, VHS tapes, CDs, etc. that are quietly yellowing or degrading. And I'm panicking about preserving this legacy.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Several months ago, I read a rather horrific New York Times article by Ashton Applewhite about age discrimination. Which for women starts at age 32. And though illegal, two-thirds of older job seekers report encountering it.

That was enough to piss me off, but then Applewhite wrote, "Recruiters say people with more than three years of work experience need not apply. Ads call for 'digital natives,' as if playing video games as a kid is proof of competence."

And I went wild with fury.

But let me digress. The term "digital native" was first coined in 2001 by Marc Prensky, in a rather brilliant essay "Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants" Pensky wrote, "What should we call these “new” students of today? ...the most useful designation I have found for them is Digital Natives. Our students today are all “native speakers” of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet."

Now as the parent of 3 digital natives, I will tell you that, unquestionably, they use technology differently than I do. I remember sharing an excellent bottle of wine with the kids at a restaurant. I started to laboriously type out the label in the notes app on my iPhone, while my oldest took a snapshot of the wine label in an instant. Whoa! Lesson learned.

Then there's checking the weather. I usually visit the weather app to find this out. My oldest temporarily moved in with us a month ago, and I heard him say, "Siri, what's the weather today." Second lesson learned.

Now back to my fury. Being a digital native doesn't automatically translate into workplace tech competence. Just like being a native English speaker does not automatically confer an ability to write well, or understand Shakespeare.

So here are things my progeny do not know how to do, despite being "digital natives."

1. Anything related to hardware. Eg printer jams - no clue how to fix them.
2. HTML. Fireworks.
3. Effectively searching for information on the Internet. Nyet. (Turns out that growing up with libraries and card catalogues confers special powers - an understanding about how research works.)

It's a quick and easy way to set up a volunteer/cultural exchange experience in over 150 countries around the world. The opportunities are incredibly varied and last as little or as long as you want them to.

Weirdly, Workaway is only marketing itself to Millenials - or so it seems in their promo video:

But all ages and even families are welcome into the program.

Here are examples of some of the incredible opportunities offered on the site:

The Three Laws, quoted as being from the "Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.", are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

This was easily 45 years ago. 2058 seemed like the very distant future. And I wondered when technology would become advanced enough for mankind to grapple with the ethics of artificial intelligence.

The article explained that in recent years, the A.I. field has made rapid advances in a range of areas, from self-driving cars and machines that understand speech, to a new generation of weapons systems that threaten to automate combat.

These developments prompted the necessity to ensure that A.I. research is focused on benefiting people, not hurting them.

The importance of the industry effort is underscored in a report issued by a Stanford University group called the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence. It lays out a plan to produce a detailed report on the impact of A.I. on society every five years for the next century.

Separately, Reid Hoffman, a founder of LinkedIn, is in discussions with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab to fund a project exploring the social and economic effects of artificial intelligence.

There is a long-running debate about designing computer and robotic systems that still require interaction with humans. For example, the Pentagon has recently begun articulating a military strategy that calls for using A.I. in which humans continue to control killing decisions, rather than delegating that responsibility to machines. See Robotics Law number 1.

Of note, the Stanford report does not consider the possibility of a "singularity" that might lead to machines that are more intelligent than us and possibly threaten mankind.